


The Way Was Carved in Ice

by MsKingBean89



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Bad Accents, Blood and Gore, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Murder, Navy, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Sex Work, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Content, Victorian, dickensian nightmare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-08-10 12:30:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20135479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsKingBean89/pseuds/MsKingBean89
Summary: He likes being hungry. It sharpens his wits. It keeps him focussed.Or perhaps he’s just used to it, like the cold. Set your mind straight and you can get used to anything....My take on Hickey's character - present takes place on Terror (beginning in Greenland) with lots of morbid Victorian poverty in the form of childhood flashbacks.





	1. Disko Bay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kt_fairy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kt_fairy/gifts).

> I was introduced to the Terror TV series a few weeks ago and it. has. destroyed. me. Obviously Hickey is my no.1 fave and I had to get my claws into him. 
> 
> SPOILERS if you haven't seen the show.
> 
> I did a bit of research, and was mostly inspired by:
> 
> \- Ian Dury (specifically the song 'Hey Hey, Take Me Away' from Laughter.)  
\- The Sex Pistols, The Pogues, Steeleye Span and The Dubliners for sea shanties and atmosphere, plus because I cannot write a fic without at least five '70s music references.  
\- 'People of the Abyss' by Jack London  
\- I'm trying to read the Dan Simmons book for ship related terms while ignoring everyone's characterisation.  
\- I've spent an embarrassing amount of time researching caulking.  
\- When I was 11 I was in a school play about workhouses, so I'm pretty much an expert. /s  
\- A constant dialogue with the fantastic and highly knowledgeable Kt_fairy, who got me into this mess in the first place.

_ The sea came in and washed me out _

_ The way was carved in ice _

_ The tokens of a buried past _

_ The shavings of a heavy life. _

** **

He likes being hungry. It sharpens his wits. It keeps him focussed.

Or perhaps he’s just used to it, like the cold. Set your mind straight and you can get used to anything.

_ “Stop whinging and get used to it,” _ Mrs Crannock at the workhouse. She was a spiteful old cunt, but she was right. A person could acclimate to the chill of a Liverpool winter. City cold. If you relaxed and breathed deep and stopped shivering, if you stopped fighting it and leaned in.

Doesn’t work _ quite _as well in the Arctic, but the principal still applies to most other hardships: Relax and accept it. Once you do, you can see what else is on offer. You’ll see things others don’t.

What does he know about seafaring? About as much as he knows about anything else - whatever he’d picked up in pubs and bawdyhouses in the docklands. Scurvy and sodomy. Snobbery, too, but you get that anywhere you get Englishmen. 

This was not his first opportunity to take to the sea. When he was eleven it had been suggested he join the Merchant Navy. Plenty of workhouse brats did - easy way to get out, easy way to get rid. But he got caught thieving and they wanted to make an example out of him, so instead he got a wallop and a month in confinement on restricted meals. The ship sailed without him.

It was something he thought about often. He had no interest in heroics or fortune - in fact very few things ever_ interested _ him - but the thought of seeing more than most men, that has always been very appealing. To have set foot in other lands. It would give you an edge, all right - to have learnt the secrets of the world. 

There are plenty of secrets on Terror. The place is as rife with gossip and rumour as an East End slum. Maybe people are the same wherever you go, or maybe the British are just a particularly miserable breed.

He kept to himself for the first month, watching and doing as he was told. Magnus Manson, the idiot giant, is particularly obliging. He’s trusting as a child, and will happily answer any questions Hickey has without agenda or concern. He’ll even do most of the work, if Hickey treats him kindly, which he does. Lay the groundwork now and who knows what Magnus will do for him later. 

The rest of the men are not so different from men he has known all his life - except the officers, of course. Never has he been so close to a _ Lord _. Never has he seen such finery on the body of a man. The only medals Hickey has ever seen were in pawnbroker’s windows.

He thinks on that. He watches the officers - there is much to learn. The proximity he has to them is a rare opportunity. He listens to the other seamen - Tozer and Armitage and Hartnell. Some of them served together on other ships. Some of them have been to China. They are men of standing now, but once they were just boys. So it is possible to rise, if one has the inclination. 

As a job, caulking is easy enough. He’s had worse situations. It’s the sort of task you can take your time over, and repetitive, allowing him space to think and to watch. The work is menial, rendering him invisible most of the time, at least to the officers, and that’s fine for a little while. 

The first job he ever had was oakum-picking. They set him down in front of a pile of old rope almost from the moment he could walk. He remembers sobbing at night, his tiny fingers red raw, burning with the embedded hemp fibres. It is strangely satisfying to think that the oakum he now tars and packs into Terror’s creaking timber joints was likely picked by another little boy in a workhouse somewhere. 

This sense of having moved up the chain of industry - of finally seeing the fruit of that bitter labour - makes Hickey feel as though he is closing in on something. He is moving in the right direction, every sign tells him so.

The second job he had, after the workhouse, was even crueller, and taught him everything he needed to know about life. Having missed his vessel, the problem of what to do with him was widely discussed by the governors. The army was suggested, and he might not have minded that. But he was small, and thinner than ever after his month’s confinement. Mrs Crannock didn’t think he’d last the winter. She seemed to take an interest in his prospects, and being very naive he supposed there must be something special about him. He knew he was quick-witted, and he could read a few letters. He could do sums in his head, when he put his mind to it.

“You don’t want to be sent up a chimney, do you, boy?” she said to him one evening, not long before he left the workhouse for good. He was twelve, then. “You don’t want to get all dirty with soot, do you?”

“No, ma’am,” he shook his head.

“I’ve just the thing for you,” she said with a thin smile.

She took him herself, led him by the hand out of the workhouse gates and down to the docks. The air was thick with unfamiliar smells - fish and salt and horse shit. He marvelled at the sights of a city he had lived in all his life and barely seen. 

They stopped at a merchant’s warehouse, and went in through the stables. He remembers being frightened of the horses, they stamped their iron hooves and snorted plumes of white breath into the winter chill, like devils. 

The next room was an office. There were books, and papers with numbers scribbled on, and he wondered if he would learn to do even cleverer sums. Would they let him hold a pen, one day? A real one, with ink? The man in charge seemed very grand; he wore a tall hat, polished shoes and a double-breasted jacket. He sat behind a desk, a beautiful, warm, gleaming thing of polished wood.

The gentleman asked Mrs Crannock a few questions he can’t remember now. He can’t really remember what happened after that, either, not clearly. But he knows that every supposed 'gentleman' he met in the years that followed was very much the same as that first. Sometimes they were fatter, or older, or smelled bad, or had no teeth, but it didn't matter. Once they led him into that cold little side room with the dirty stained divan, once they locked the door and put their hands on him - they were all the same man, really.

He must have cried the first time, because he does remember having his hair stroked, and being given a boiled sweet to suck afterwards. 

He remembers Mrs Crannock buttoning his jerkin and saying, “There now, smile boy. Say, ‘thank you’.”

He probably did say thank you, too. He spat the sweet out as soon as no one was looking, and slipped into his pocket. Someone would surely swap him something even better for it when he got back to the workhouse. 

That was his last night under Mrs Crannock’s guardianship. The merchant sent for him the next day.

‘Messenger boy’ was what they put on his papers, but he was never once asked to carry a message, or deliver a package, or perform any other errand. He was given a place to sleep in the coal cellar of the trader’s warehouse with four other boys, all around his age. 

He always remembered to smile when something hurt, or when he knew pain was on its way. They were given gin, but he soon learnt to spit that out, like the boiled sweet. He didn’t like the dozy feeling it gave him, the muddled head. He wanted to be there for all of it. He wanted to stay alert. 

Besides, gin was a valuable commodity, and if you could abstain, then you had something everyone else wanted.

* * *

He thinks about Cornelius Hickey a lot. Not the blue-eyed whelp he gutted one balmy evening in Bethnal Green - there is hardly any point thinking about him - no, he thinks about who Hickey is _ now _, and who he must be in the future. He likes the name Cornelius, it’s long and curls on the tongue. Someone put thought into choosing that name, it is the name of a wanted child. 

Scurvy, sodomy, snobbery. And singing, too, sailors really bloody love a song.

The first day Terror takes to water somebody whistles a tune - Hickey thinks it could be _ Early in the Morning _, but a ribald snigger ripples through the men on deck, and when there are no officers in earshot they began to sing as they work, each competing with their mates to spew out the filthiest verse. 

** **

“_ Twas on the good ship Venus, by christ you should’a seen us, _” 

“_ The figurehead was a whore in bed-- _”

“--_ sucking the captain’s penis! _”

** **

Hickey laughs because everyone else is laughing, and he makes sure to pay attention and memorise the tune so he can join in next time. 

** **

_ "Twas on a Chinese station, _

_ We caused a great sensation. _

_ We sunk a junk in a sea of spunk _

_ By mutual masturbation--” _

** **

Men are the same everywhere, he decides. At least poor men - common men.

Buggery is the first thing most men know about the navy - joking about it is the easiest way to rile up a sailor on leave - but until now Hickey hasn’t given it much thought. It is a hanging offence, but so are plenty of things, and it reeks of hypocrisy to him - expecting more than a hundred men to guard their virtue like nuns for months, even years. 

** **

_ “Frigging in the rigging, there was fuck all else to do…” _

** **

That’s the bottom line, he thinks. Boredom. It's as bad as hunger when it comes to keeping discipline.

Cornelius Hickey, or at least the current Cornelius Hickey, has not ever suffered from boredom, and maybe for this reason he considers sex a perfunctory act. Still, he doesn’t mind indulging from time to time, especially when it’s useful to him. It’s certainly a necessity for some men, and apparently William Gibson is one such man. 

He comes to find Hickey one evening. Hickey is alone in the hold, pretending to patch the planking aft. He told Darlington he saw gaps there yesterday, and Darlington never bothered to check, just sent him down to mend them. They are in Greenland, and so far north now that he wears his thickest woollens all the time, even though the ship is heated. It’s warmer in the hold, near the steam engines, and so he will continue to find gaps there.

But tonight Gibson interrupts, creeping in like a cat.

“You do, don’t you?” He whispers, sour desperation on his breath. 

Gibson looms over Hickey, he presses in, though there’s plenty of room. Gibson is tall, one of the tallest men on Terror, and Hickey is small. He doesn’t like being cornered, so he turns quickly, slipping a hand into his pocket to touch the handle of his knife. That steadies him.

“Do what?” Hickey raises his chin, trying to catch Gibson’s expression in the dim light of his lantern.

“_ You _ know,” Gibson insists, pressing even closer, still unaware of the blade which Hickey is now grasping tight. Gibson’s knee nudges at the inside of Hickey’s thigh, and Hickey suppresses a knowing smirk. Gibson is further up the ladder than him. And he needs something.

“Oh yes,” he whispers back, lowering his eyes, coy as a high-class lady who’s never felt a cockstand. “_ I _know. Come on then, we must be quick.”

Credit to him, Gibson knows how to take an order. That’s stewards, for you, they live to serve, and they can work buttons quick as lightning. He has his slops down and his prick out before Hickey has even resigned himself to the task. He takes Gibson in his hand, considers being timid and then decides it’s not worth the farce. He tugs, and Gibson whines like a girl, eyes squeezed shut. It will be quick. 

Hickey does not kneel, rather squats. He’s made a lazy job of his mock-caulking so far, and there are hot globs of tar splattered on the deck which he doesn’t much fancy getting all over his only pair of trousers. He sets about his new task with somewhat more vigour. 

As he applies pressure with his tongue and speed with his lips, Gibson begins muttering something, whispering encouragement maybe. He doesn’t touch Hickey, doesn’t try to force him or pull on his hair, which puts him above most men, if Hickey had to pick and choose qualities. Besides that, it’s all very common, very unremarkable, until Hickey thinks he is nearing the end. Gibson starts to keen like an animal, he whispers the same thing, over and over, _ "Oh, oh please, oh please, oh please _."

Hickey isn’t sure whether he’s begging for release or permission, but either way he likes it, and his own body starts to respond. His fingers move from the knife handle, and he touches himself over his heavy trousers.

Suddenly Gibson pulls away, leaving Hickey gasping, mouth gaping, lips wet. 

Hickey looks up, sharply, rises to his feet again. "What?"

"Would you…? Oh, please…" Gibson obviously doesn't want to _ stop _, his eyes are wild and gleaming like marbles, the man is practically panting with desire. He reaches for the buttons on Hickey's slops, those long clever fingers eagerly tugging on his waistband. 

_ Ah, of course. _ Hickey can't help being a bit disappointed, but he's willing to do it if it's what Gibson wants. Hickey slaps his hands away, preferring to undress himself. As he begins to turn his back, Gibson makes a low, strained sound in his throat, 

"No," he murmurs, urgently, "no, _ you _ must… would you?"

He slides his hand down the front of Hickey's trousers so deftly that all Hickey can do is stand there shocked. Gibson flicks open the buttons on his long johns and strokes the length of Hickey's erection, which is now aching like a bruise. 

Their eyes meet properly for the first time. He's a striking man to look at, he has an interesting face. Bright eyes, deep set. Sharp cheekbones. Gibson pulls his own breeches down further, over his hips, turning back and reaching for the nearest crate to brace against, and now Hickey finally knows his mind. 

It's not often he finds himself at this aspect, but there’s no time to give it too much thought, so Hickey just acts. He hasn’t anything like bear’s grease to ease the way, so he spits into his palm and strokes his own length. It will have to do. Gibson whimpers at the sound.

He grips Gibson's hips. The man has no fat at all, he is skin and bone and gamy muscle, but he melts like butter as Hickey lines his straining prick up against him.

"Cornelius," he moans, and Hickey pushes in. He likes that name very much.

Gibson doesn’t shut up, not once, as Hickey fucks him hard against the storage boxes, but Hickey doesn’t mind it really. His voice is low and no one can hear them down here anyway. It’s good. It surprises him how good it is. It’s hot and desperate and different, and when Gibson finally spends, jerking against him with a gutteral sob, it triggers such a paroxysm in Hickey that his eyes slam shut and he can’t help letting out a groan himself, heat radiating out from his middle. 

The moments that follow are quiet and heavy, thick with sleepy satisfaction. Hickey pulls away and steps back, grimacing at the chill on his bare skin, and Gibson sags forward, knees bent. Hickey wipes his brow, adjusts his clothing and searches his pockets for papers and tobacco. His fingers are still trembling slightly as he rolls a cigarette, they are warm from Gibson’s flesh. He strikes a match, lights, inhales. His climax retreats, his body settles.

"We are friends, are we not, Cornelius?" Gibson murmurs as he tucks himself back in and buttons himself up, all elbows and angles.

"If you like." Hickey replies, feeling very calm, very much at peace.

"Good. Good," Gibson lowers his eyes, he is bashful now, but not unhappy. He rests a hand on Hickey's jacket, the broken button halfway down. He plucks at it lightly, "I could mend that for you. It would be nothing."

"Very kind I'm sure, Mr Gibson." Hickey smiles, breathing smoke.

Next time he’ll ask for something better.

* * *

He has had a friend before. Not like Gibson, not like anyone on Terror. Bessie was a street whore he met in Liverpool when he was fourteen. 

Having survived the winter Mrs Crannock expected to kill him, in the spring he walked out of the merchant’s coal cellar in bare feet, never to return. He would be his own man, now that he knew what that meant. 

He found work quickly at a cotton mill.

He simply showed up at the gates one morning and the factory foreman chose him out of a crowd of boys - because he was the smallest. The machines were marvellous things, he had heard; wonders of the modern age, powered by _ steam _. 

The factory floor was hell itself. Dust in hung in the air and lay thick on the ground, heat blasted from the coal furnaces, which hissed scalding breaths of steam to keep the great demonic machines working. The mechanical looms were furious creatures of wood and metal and cotton strands pulled tight as strings on the devil's fiddle. The noise was monstrous; the thin arms went _ clackclack clack _as they thrust in and out, up and down, snapping at the air. 

He was hired as a scavenger, meaning it was up to him to crawl right underneath the looms and untangle threads, fish out stray clumps of cotton and unclog the moving parts when they jammed. The dust and dark underneath was unbearable, once you were inside the great creature the roaring violence of it was maddening. He saw one girl lose three fingers on his first day. A week later he saw a boy lose an arm. That child was younger than him, he remembers the pale, limp body, the black-red mess of tissue in place of his shoulder, like something in a butcher shop. And overhead those great arms kept _ clackclack clacking _, in out in out, because machines are built for one purpose and it is not feeling.

He would die there, he was certain. He knows - has always known - his own limits. A man must be honest with himself, even if he is not with others.

After he’d run away from the factory (with the foreman’s purse), he tried day-labouring on the docks. That didn’t last long either; he was eternally scrawny and not up to heavy lifting. He sold ha’penny papers, which was a useful guise for pickpocketing - he was very good at that - he shined shoes and even had a brief stint in a theatre cleaning actors' dressing rooms. Generally he returned to thieving, it seemed to be the thing he was built for. That's how he came to meet Bessie.

Bessie was a drinker. He had seen her before - by then he knew every doxy in the city by face or reputation. They called her Red Bess, for her copper-bright strawberry blond curls (which he later learnt was actually a wig, the pox had left her almost completely bald), and wore a dress which had once been scarlet, he supposed, but was now a shabby rust colour. 

He’d gone to rob her. She was lying in the alley behind a pub, skirts up over one shoulder, lily white thighs glowing in the moonlight. He’d taken her for dead, or close to it, but as he pulled down her dress to get to her purse, she stirred and grasped his wrist.

“Ain’t yow a proper gen’eman,” she slurred, one eye opening slowly, “protecting poor Bess’s modesty.”

She kept hold of him, and hauled herself up, “have a sip?” she swung out one hand, shaking a bottle with a dribble of gin at the bottom.

He shook his head. She drank the rest, throwing her head back and tipping the bottle into her bright red mouth, still holding his wrist. Satiated, she grinned broadly and looked at him, “Why!” She blinked, her black spidery lashes brushing her cheeks, “you ain’t nowt but a boy, are ya? Aww, come on with me, lovie, Bess’ll look after ya…”

She staggered out of the alley, and he followed her, just out of curiosity at first. 

It turned out she was quite a bit better off than him. At least, she was renting a room to herself at a boarding house not far from the docks. In her drunken stupor she had him hide underneath her skirts so that she could sneak him past her landlady. 

“All right, our kid,” she yawned, throwing herself onto the bed. “I’m away to sleep for a bit. You can stay if you like, keep me warm.”

She shut her eyes and began to snore, still clutching the empty bottle. The room smelt badly of men’s sweat and men’s spendings, but the bed was piled high with brightly coloured blankets, dresses and tattered scarfs. It sagged heavily in the middle, but he had never slept in a real bed before, so he thought he may as well.

Bessie was only a few years his senior, and she was a kind and motherly sort. She liked him, or seemed to. Maybe she just thought of him as a kind of pet, she liked stroking his hair, she liked fussing over him. She didn't feed him - she could barely remember to feed herself. 

He didn't need her for that, he managed all right by himself on pickpocketing. Still, he found himself going back to her digs a few times a week, whenever he wanted to get some proper sleep behind a closed door. He brought Bessie bottles of gin by way of rent, and she was always happy to see him, no matter what state of inebriation she was in. 

One night after a few bottles of her beloved ‘blue ruin’, Bessie told him about a child she’d had many years ago, and lost. Whether ‘lost’ meant dead or misplaced, he never found out.

"My poor boy," she would whisper, as she wrapped her cold, skinny arms around him, breathing gin vapours into his hair, "Bessie looks after you, doesn't she?" 

He had never been held like that before, and maybe it was what being looked after felt like. Whatever it was, he grew attached to her in his own way.

Sometimes he arrived to find her occupied with a client, and he would stand in the murky landing outside, smoking and waiting for it to be over. He was keeping a knife in his pocket even then, and when Bessie's door swung open and the punter finally came out, adjusting his filthy trousers or slicking back his filthy hair, he would watch them from the shadows and want more than anything to draw the knife, to work them over with it until they were twitching out their last on the grubby hallway rug. He thought about the mechanical arms of the cotton mill, the relentless unfeeling.

Eventually the punter left and Bessie always came to the door, somehow knowing he was waiting. She’d whisper hoarsely, “Are you there, our kid?” and he’d show himself, walk right into her waiting arms.

They weren’t fucking. She offered once or twice, both drunk and sober, but he wasn’t interested. He couldn’t see the point, and he preferred to keep Bessie a separate thing. 

Besides that, he was honest with himself. He knew what he liked, and it was not her. He was no monk, as he grew older and the grim days in the merchant’s coal cellar began to recede in his mind he did feel moments of desire, like anyone. For this purpose he had one or two ‘occasionals’ - other men who were like him - but he never cared for anyone except Bessie. No one else seemed quite as real to him as she did.

“What d’yow want, our kid?” She asked him once, while washing herself in a bowl of vinegar and water. “What’d you want from life?”

“Dunno,” he replied, lying on his back, staring at her cracked and stained ceiling. “Hot food and lodging?”

“Those are things you _ need _,” she tutted, shaking her head, sponging between her legs, “I mean things you want.”

He didn’t agree with her. He frequently slept out on the street, in doorways or at the dump. So you did not need lodging. He had gone days without food, too - had eaten the woody stems of grapes he found dropped on the ground, onion skins and and other mysterious fibrous matter from bins and gutters. So hot food was also a luxury - at least the kind of food Bessie meant. 

“Tell yow what I want, kid,” she said now, finally squeezing out the sponge and tossing it aside. She lowered her skirts and came to sit on the bed, “I want to leave Liverpool.”

“Why?” He asked, quite interested. No one had ever suggested such a thing - except for the workhouse governors keen to fob him off on the navy. 

“It’s shite here,” she shrugged. “I hate it. Got a ciggie for poor Bessie, love?”

“Pay me back for last time, first,” he snapped, still staring at the ceiling. It was evening, the shadows from Bessie’s grimy window were growing long. He ought to go out soon, he’d been doing some good trade outside the music halls, there was a popular act in town and the crowds were rich. 

“I will,” Bessie whined, laying down next to him, her long red wig tickling his cheek, “I’m working later.”

“You spend it too quick. You’ll be down the gin palace stupefied before the spunk’s dried on your skirts.”

“Filthy boy,” she slapped his thigh, “so cruel to old Bessie, so heartless.”

“I am heartless.” He pulled out a cigarette for himself to prove it. 

“Shouldn’t let you stay here.” Bessie said sulkily, watching him light it, “dunno why I do.”

“Where would you go?” He asked, puffing smoke, still curious about her earlier declaration, “If you left Liverpool? Manchester?”

“London.”

“Why?”

“More work there than just whoring, in’t there? I could be a seamstress. I could be a ladies maid, or work in a shop.”

“You?” He snorted. He gave her the rest of his cigarette so she’d stop pawing at him.

“Why not?” She said, voice high as she inhaled. “Ain’t you never wanted a thing? A better thing?”

“What’s better about being a ladies maid?”

“It’s respectable. Gawd, I can’t talk to you, you little guttersnipe, you don’t know nothing. Your sort ain’t raised to want things.”

He could have argued that no one had ever bothered to ‘raise’ him at all, but why waste his breath. It did trouble him, though. What did it mean, to want things? He understood hunger, cold, pain, discomfort - all of these had been the pillars of his life so far. Respectability was not something he had ever really considered. He didn’t think he ever desired anything beyond his most immediate needs - even sex was generally left to chance and circumstance. 

“I want things,” he said to Bess, being contrary. 

He’d wanted a pen, once, a pen with ink in it. Cold darkness settled on his shoulders at the thought. A gentleman watching him from behind a desk. Humiliation on its way. 

The shadows on Bessie's ceiling became jagged black spikes.

“I want to kill those men you see,” he said, to Bess, but mostly to himself. “I want to chiv’em. That's what I want.”

“Oh yeah?” She peered up at him from where she lay on the bed, one black painted eyebrow curving upwards, “Well we’ve all wanted that, my darling. Ever kill someone?”

“No.”

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” She rolled onto her side and curled into his body, like they were lovers. She smelled of sweat and vinegar and his tobacco. 

“Dunno. Stealing.” The worst things had been done _ to _him.

“Then ‘ow d’yow know you could do it? Kill a man?”

“I just know I could.” As soon as he said it, he knew it was true. 

“With a chiv?” She asked, her voice throaty and low.

“With anything,” he replied. His breeches were suddenly tight, he felt warm and wanting all over. 

Bessie noticed and slyly moved her hand down from his belt buckle, but he pushed her away, “Piss off.”

“Suit yon’self, mardy-arse.” She tutted. She sat up and stretched, getting off the bed. She started to dress, and he watched her as she pulled up stockings and wriggled into a half-laced corset, “anyway, if I could do it I would, but what about the body, eh kid? Di’n’t think on that, did yow?”

“Do it by the docks,” he shrugged, “s’where you do it anyway. Do ‘em, rob 'em, then toss ‘em in the sea.”

She blinked at him, chewing her lip. “They’d still find ‘em. They’d bob up like dead cats.”

“So? We’d be gone by then.”

“Would yow really do it?” she cocked her head.

“Might,” he said.

Bessie smiled. 

* * *

Gibson comes to him frequently while they are at Disko Bay. He will sidle past and slyly ask, "Would you?" Just like the first time. 

He always asks, and Hickey finds this innocent politeness rather charming. Gibson is a soft hearted man, really - a slave to his body - but soft hearted. When they are alone he speaks softly to Hickey, he strokes him and kisses him like they are sweethearts. He likes it fine, but he likes fucking Gibson more. 

If anyone else on Terror has noticed their new association, no one has said anything, at least not to Hickey. Gibson - Hickey calls him Billy, almost always now - is conscientious about choosing the time and place. He has a private cubicle, but he has refused Hickey entry several times now. It’s not private enough, apparently; the walls are thin, there is no real door, and he worries Jopson or Peglar might hear. Hickey has his own suspicions about Peglar, but he keeps them to himself.

“_ I _ can be quiet,” is all he says to Billy. “And I’ve an idea how to occupy your mouth until you can learn to be.”

Billy’s eyes widen at that, blue like the hottest part of a flame. He tells Hickey to get down in the hold at once, loud enough to be an order, tense enough to be a plea. 

Hickey doesn’t like being the first one down there - not because of the dark or the rats, he’s never been squeamish about either - but the waiting. He hates waiting for anything. 

Add to that his disappointment at being denied. He could take or leave getting his prick sucked in Gibson’s poxy little sleeping space, he was really more interested in looking around. There was a newspaper on the bed, he saw it over Billy’s shoulder. He has a washbasin, books and some toiletries. Hickey wants to see these things. He wants to hold them and rifle through them and become familiar. He doesn’t know why, he just doesn’t like Billy having secrets.

“Are you writing a letter?” He asks as Billy works the buttons on his trousers. It’s getting to be predictable already; too practised. 

They have all been told that this might be their last chance to send letters home until after the passage has been found. Almost every man on board has been spending his evening muttering over scraps of paper. 

“What? Yes, of course I am,” Billy murmurs, kissing his neck. Hickey doesn’t mind kissing, but they haven’t done it on the lips yet. Maybe if they do that they really will be sweethearts. His prick jumps.

“Who are you writing to?” He asks, rolling his head back to allow Gibson’s tongue to reach behind his ear. No one has ever done that to him before, it’s the queerest thing, it makes him shiver all over.

“My mother,” Billy says, hunching his shoulders to compensate for their height difference.

“What are you writing to her?”

“Why do you want to know?” Gibson withdraws, and Hickey suffers for want of him. 

“Curiosity,” he says.

“Who are _ you _writing to?” Gibson asks pointedly. His hands are still on Hickey’s braces. 

“I’m not,” Hickey replies, honestly. He had contemplated the notion of sending a letter to the real Cornelius Hickey’s family, but while that might be amusing it would also be incredibly foolish. 

Sweet, gentle Billy does not understand his flippancy. 

“Oh, Cornelius,” he says, stroking Hickey’s cheek with the back of his hand. That is _ too _ gentle, and Hickey bats it away. Billy pays no mind, he’s used to Hickey’s quirks by now, “do you want me to write it for you?” He asks, pale eyes searching the darkness.

“Eh? Why would I want--?” it takes him a moment, and when he catches on he is unexpectedly furious, “I know how to _ write _, thank you Mr Gibson.” He steps back. 

“I’m sorry!” Billy says immediately, “I meant no offense.”

“I know exactly what you meant.”

He doesn’t know why it has made him so angry, he’s sure people have thought him stupid before. Why would Billy - _ Mr Gibson _ \- be any different? 

"Caulker's mate must be a dunce, is that it?" He hisses.

“No, not that at all,” Billy licks his lips anxiously, eyes darting down to Hickey’s fingers, like a child who’s had supper snatched away, “I only meant… you know, _ Darlington _ cannot read, and he is your--”

“Darlington is an idiot.” Hickey spits, pulling his waistcoat straight in a pantomime of affrontedness. He’s not actually going anywhere, he’s as up for it as Billy is, but he’s enjoying this game, it’s a new one for them. 

“You are right,” Billy nods eagerly, “the man is a fool. You are the one of the cleverest men on Terror, and _ I _ am the idiot for assuming…"

"Cleverest man on Terror, am I?" Hickey scratches his beard thoughtfully.

_ " _ On the expedition!" Gibson declares. "You are so quick and canny…" he's babbling now and Hickey is fascinated by it. " _ Darlington _ ought to be Caulker’s mate, and _ you _, you ought to…”

“What?” Hickey tilts his head and quirks an eyebrow, “What ought I to be?” He lets his tongue play in the corner of his mouth as he rakes Billy over, stepping close once more. “What position would you have me fill, Mr Gibson?”

Gibson catches the playful look and quickly gleans his meaning. He looks relieved but still cautious, an exciting combination, “forgive me, Cornelius?”

“Give me good reason to.”

Gibson is good on his knees, but better on all fours. Hickey doesn’t treat his body with anywhere near the same affection Billy shows him, but he is learning how to give pleasure, using his hands and his tongue to some advantage while they are rutting like this. Sometimes he sinks his teeth into the flesh of Gibson’s shoulder, and then he has to clamp his free hand over the steward’s mouth. 

Afterwards he wipes the spit, sweat and tears on Gibson’s own underclothes. Let him put up with the mess, he’s the one with all the perks. 

“Am I forgiven?” Billy asks again, once he has caught his breath. These moments are pleasant, it feels good to be warm all over, even if only for a short while. It will get colder than this before the journey ends, Hickey knows.

“For now,” Hickey yawns, rearranging his many layers. “Perhaps you’ll learn to take more care in your calculations, Billy. You have me all wrong.”

“I cannot help not knowing you, Cornelius, you speak so little of England,” Billy says, straightening up finally. He is a man again, not a supplicant, “besides, it makes no odds to me whether or not you had any schooling.”

Hickey frowns. “I don’t speak of England because it is behind me.”

“And here I am in front of you,” Billy winks and gives him such a saucy grin that for once Hickey laughs and means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can only apologise for my dreadful attempt at the Liverpudlian accent.  
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.  
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\- Song at the beginning is 'Hard Road' by Johnny Flynn  
\- Dirty song lyrics from 'Good Ship Venus' (yes, ok, the Sex Pistols did it as 'Frigging in the Rigging', but it's also a super old song, I swear.)
> 
> Hope you liked it :)


	2. Beechey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More of the same, really. Hickey does not like Beechey.

They’ve stopped again. It seemed an age they spent in Baffin Bay, waiting for the right conditions to cross the Lancaster Sound. Hickey doesn’t know what the right conditions look like, nor could he point out the Lancaster Sound on a map - not that anyone shows maps to caulker’s mates. All he knows is that they had been making progress, and now they are no longer. 

They left England in May and it is now September, but it is not like any September Hickey has known. It is the bitterest winter he has ever felt, and the men who have sailed this far North before jeer at anyone who complains and tell them to brace themselves for ‘real cold’ in the coming months. Hickey doesn’t complain, because after all his prospects remain good. He has more clothes than he would have known what to do with back in Liverpool. The food suits him pretty well; they had fresh beef in Greenland, and since landing on Beechey have eaten whale. He never would have imagined eating something so strange as that. He should like to tell Bess about it. 

What is a year, anyway? It is nothing. It will be worth all the shivering and the endless patching of holes and keeping watch and sitting about staring at the same bleak landscape day after day. Once this misery has been overcome his life will truly begin. Perhaps he will change his name again. Perhaps he will remain Cornelius Hickey. A decision for later.

So he accepts this unnatural summer-winter. He breathes deep and slow, and he forces himself not to shiver.

He relaxes into it. He knows his duties by now and he knows the other men. He knows his place and theirs. It gives him plenty to think about. The crew on Terror are all familiar with one another now. At least the petty officers and the mates and the rest of the dregs. Poor men all, from poor families and poor villages, packed in on top of each other, just as they have been since the day they were born. 

Many of them are orphans, or sons of sailors, which is the same thing. Few knew their fathers even if they had them. They have the officers instead, they have their captains. They are pathetically grateful about it, they defer and they grovel. The toffs don't even have to work that hard, it's just the way things always are. 

All you need to do is beat them and feed them, he thinks, and that's enough to impress them. Impress them, and you're halfway to owning them.

No one has ever fed him. No one has ever impressed him. He has always done for himself, and he owes nothing to anybody. Not even Billy.

He has been inside Gibson’s berth, now. Not by invitation - he waited until Billy was occupied elsewhere, and made sure no one saw him.

It is neatly arranged, with barely a trace of the Billy he knows. The books are all articles of war and dining etiquette. There is a bible, but no place marked and it's not as well thumbed as the others. His toiletries are simple and plain. Hickey stroked Billy's shaving brush and used his comb and gazed into the little looking-glass, and felt nothing. The bed is narrow, and he can imagine Billy folding himself into it like a portmanteau. He can imagine squeezing in beside him. He can imagine fucking him there, pushing his face into the pillow to keep him quiet. He'd like to wear those crisp white gloves as he does it.

He wonders if Billy has imagined the same thing. He wonders if Billy lies there at night frigging himself, thinking about Hickey, whispering and gasping the way he does, like a man with a fever. It wouldn't surprise him, every other man on Terror seems to be permanently preoccupied with self abuse. Some of them have dirty pictures torn from old papers and pamphlets, and someone has carved a naked woman into the door of the heads. He finds that crude. He doesn't like to think about what they do in there.

At least Gibson would be clean about it; he's very fastidious. And he has privacy, whereas Hickey is often jostled awake in his hammock by the man beside him swinging this way and that as he huffs and whimpers over some stage actress, or a backstreet harlot he once paid. It shows a lack of character, Hickey thinks. If a man cannot control his own person, then what does he have? 

As the months go by and the cold sharpens, the men grow more familiar and the food duller. Hickey has mapped out every inch of the ship he is permitted to, and envies Gibson more than ever, because there are thresholds he may cross which Hickey may not; where the plain dark timber transforms into polished mahogany, where the plates are fine china and the knives gleam brightly against crisp white table linen. 

He has seen these things in passing - the silverware and the linen and the candlesticks and the crystal glasses - he has seen them dirtied and used, carried off in inelegant piles to be cleaned, like a carnival packed away, the brightness dimmed and the oil lamps put out, left reeking. Hickey has appraised it all in his head. 

Hickey is champing to know what they talk about in there. He spends all his evenings thinking about it, while the other men strain and pant around him. He thinks about finding his way in there, too. What a great joke it would be, a workhouse orphan in a captain's great cabin. Like a rat in Buckingham Palace.

He's not a steward - or a lieutenant, come to that - but why should it matter, when neither is he a caulker's mate? The longer they are out here in this frozen waste, the less sense those dividing lines seem to make, the more certain he becomes that he must challenge them.

"What do they talk about?" He asks Gibson, watching him clean the tableware one Sunday evening. The plates are beautiful as paintings, white and blue and and so bright and smooth in the lamplight. Billy concentrates on his task with tender care. Hickey would like to slide his tongue across every dish.

"The ice," Billy replies, voice low and indulgent, "their careers. Captain Crozier first went to sea at thirteen, you know."

"Indeed," Hickey nods, as if that's interesting to him. He thinks about the things he had done by thirteen. He wonders if the navy would have suited him better. Perhaps it would have been more of the same. "What else?"

"It's not my job to eavesdrop."

Hickey presses his lips together and says nothing for now. He knows he must tread carefully, especially with Billy, who knows more about him than anyone. 

He changes tack, stretches his face into a smile and catches Gibson's eye, then allows his lashes to flutter down again, "And what about you, Billy? When did you first go to sea?"

"I was seventeen," Gibson replies, smiling to himself, flattered by this attention. "After my sister married and there was no place for me at home." 

"You have done so well for yourself," Hickey takes the dried plate from him, pretending to be helping. "Now a steward." Their fingers touch, which was deliberate. Gibson's hands are cold from his dishwashing, Hickey likes it. It feels clean.

"A man must make a life for himself." Gibson smiles.

"Quite so." 

His mind drifts. Gibson hasn't anything to tell him, not anything useful. He doesn't know why he bothers, except that Billy can be good company a lot of the time, and most men on Terror seem to have grouped off in a similar fashion. He rolls a cigarette, watching Billy tidy his plates away neatly into their fine velvet beds. How Bess used to pine for velvet.

"Your boots are a disgrace," Billy says as he closes the chest he has been packing and glances down at Hickey's feet. "You'll end up with duty owing - again."

"They're working boots," Hickey gives a shrug, looking down himself. They are scuffed at the toes, perhaps there are tar stains, but it isn't as if he's set foot on land in weeks.

"Cornelius," Billy gives him one of his looks, and Hickey recognises that he's made a misstep somewhere. "I know this is your first time at sea, but you're going to have to learn the rules eventually."

"Lucky I've got you to keep me honest, eh Mr Gibson," Hickey grins, and offers Billy a look of his own. Billy colours, shakes his head.

"Bring them to me later, I'll see to it."

"Much obliged," he finishes rolling a second cigarette and hands it to Billy, who puts it between his lips and lifts the heavy crockery chest with both hands, nodding goodbye to him and returning to the officers' berths, where he has more chores to do, probably. 

* * *

His time on Terror is perhaps the longest he has spent in one place since his childhood. At least when the ships were moving he could picture where he was going. On Beechey nothing moves. 

He had never lived a still life. Whether fraying rope or clacking machines or vile men and their sweaty grasping hands, moments of peace and reflection were rare as summer picnics. Out here, surrounded by the pressing cold, where even seabirds are growing rare, there is little to occupy him. He needs to move on. He needs things to change.

He's on the lookout for it - always has been. Shifts and tremors in the status quo. He keeps an ear out, and he reads the papers.

When he was fifteen, the French revolted again, and then the Belgians. He had no idea where Belgium was, but he read about it, and it gave him the idea to leave Liverpool for London. If the rest of Europe was in revolt, then maybe England would be next. He’d certainly heard that kind of talk in the taverns and gin palaces - if the frogs started lopping off heads like they had the last time, then the newly coronated King William of England had better bloody watch himself. 

He reasoned that if something happened then it would be in London, and he didn’t want to miss it. These were interesting times, men were climbing new ladders every day.

He told Bessie as much, and she decided she would come with him, much to his surprise. 

"It were  _ me  _ had the notion to go in the first place," she insisted, "and someone's got to look after yer, kid."

The journey took almost a full week, and Bessie was a millstone around his neck the whole way. They had planned to make their way south on stagecoaches when they had the money and shanks’ pony when they didn't. He had the idea that she could make money off the other travellers at the inns they stopped in, while he kept a lookout. But the inns held other charms too tempting for Red Bess to resist - a few days outside of Liverpool she grew morose and nostalgic, and her old habits took her harder than before. 

He nearly left her behind in Coventry, lying knock down drunk under the bar of some filthy roadside pub. But he hadn't the means to get anywhere without her, and when she woke the next day she was all sweetness and sniffling apologies. She turned a few tricks and promised to give him every penny she made from then on, if only he’d keep her steady on the gin. He relented, and agreed to take care of her purse. 

They took a coach after that - the cheapest seats, up with the driver, and she lay her head on his shoulder all the way, lurid red curls tickling his neck and her rank sweat stinging his nostrils as she slurred  _ The Leaving of Liverpool _ softly to herself. He watched the countryside pass with vague interest and thought about London.

* * *

There's a party for Christmas on Beechey, and rum rations are increased for the day. Hickey has been giving his to Manson, Gibson and Golding for months, anyway, and he thinks carefully about what to do with the surplus.

The feast will take place on the shore, and all morning Hickey lugs great long tables and cooking pots and tins and salted pork across the rocky land. His boots will be ruined again. Then they must all stand huddled and exhausted through Sir John's 'bumper' Christmas service. Hickey doesn't listen to the words, he is too distracted by the space.

He has heard the arctic described as an emptiness, or a nothingness. But it is the furthest thing from that. Without the stifling agitation of people living their ugly little lives, this place is stark and clean, but not empty - it is filled with something else. Something choking and so large he cannot comprehend it. They do not belong here, but this land has the power to consume - to  _ make _ them belong. 

The other men must feel it too, Hickey scrutinises each of their faces as they dutifully listen to Sir John's sermonising. His deep voice carries through the cold air, shatters on the grey rocks, and the congregants wince and shift, chapped hands swollen and burning inside their gloves. Some of them look unwell, and it's more than the biting cold; it's a bone-aching sick-heartedness, the first stirrings of a very particular kind of suffering which will last and last. He has seen it before, so many times - at factory gates and behind curtains at brothels, in opium dens and ghost-faced inmates at the workhouse.

Perhaps the officers do not see it, or perhaps they know better than to let on, but once the church part of the day is done with, it is they who guide the men towards festivity. Their rich authoritative voices are soothing, they know how to make a warm friendly laugh carry through a crowd. The mood slowly lifts like a good steamed pudding as meat is roasted and drinks are poured. Sir John has allowed the use of his mechanical music player, and strangled music hall tunes now ring out across the stagnant shore. The black ships loom over them, the rigging blurred like fine cobweb by a rolling mist.

No one is looking at that, because Commander Fitzjames is now handing each of the officers of Erebus and Terror aprons to tie around their waists, announcing that 'in honour of the day', the lieutenants will serve the men their Christmas meal. Everyone finds great fun in this, of course, even Hartnell's brother from Erebus has a smile on his face, and he's been dead on his feet all day.

Little, Hodgson and po faced Irving are smiling pleasantly and magnanimously dishing up stew onto the men's plates as they file past. The sailors still nod their heads respectfully at their superiors, practically tugging their forelocks. When Hickey's turn comes he takes the opportunity to look each officer in the eye, to see what's there. They look back with only the faintest flicker of concern at the liberty he is taking, and as he expected, they seem to forgive him in an instant. It is Christmas day, after all.

Crozier and Sir John do not serve anyone, but they are there, watching, and in the end their officers and Fitzjames go to join them, sitting apart. They still have their fine china and their linen. 

The men are all enjoying themselves in earnest, they drink steadily enough to get themselves drunk and with the drunkness comes the bloody singing again, just try to stop them. No more dirty rhymes now, the sailors sing about home, birds and cities and hillsides - their women and families.

Hickey has no appetite. His mind drifts out to the rest of the island, to the frozen sea surrounding them, and that dreadful feeling of being in the middle of something so great you cannot even see it. He is saved when Gibson is ordered to return to Terror with the officers' dirty plates.

There are two tubs full, and usually it would be a job for Georgie Chambers or Davie Young, but they're both skin and bones and have had more to drink than eat today, so neither is up to carrying anything fragile. Hickey has duty owing - Hickey always has duty owing - and for once he is more than happy to do some physical labour. Anything to set his mind right, anything to get back on the ship.

They trudge back slowly and in silence, muscles pulled tight against the cold, breath crystallising in the air before them. Terror isn't empty. Jopson is about somewhere, Hickey heard him sent back for more whisky, and there are men on watch on the deck, more men waiting below for their watch to begin.

Still, the ship is quieter than it's ever been, and once the feeling starts to return to his extremities he begins to have ideas. He watches Gibson heat the water for the dishes and set everything to soak, and while his back is turned Hickey raises his cuff to his mouth and bites the thread on one of his buttons. He lets it hit the floor, ringing like a tiny bell, and Gibson looks up, then down, then tuts.

"Keep hold of it, I'll fix it for you later."

"Why put it off? Wouldn't want to be seen shirking your duties, would you, Mr Gibson?"

"I serve the officers, Mr Hickey," Billy replies haughtily, returning to his washing tub, "not you." He's smiling. This is a joke they often share.

"Not me?" Hickey catches his eye and raises his eyebrows. Gibson looks back for a long time, before grinning wide.

"Oh, if you must. But I can't be away from this long," he nods at the pile of wet, slippery china.

They are careful and they don't pass anyone on the way to Gibson's little cubicle, but still Billy tries to keep him at bay, halting outside the curtain.

"It won't take a moment, give me your coat," he extends a hand.

"If it won't take long, let me in," Hickey leans on the frame, more coquettishly than he would usually bother with.

"Cornelius, if we're seen…"

"There's no one about," Hickey shrugs lightly, "look a lot worse if I'm caught malingering out here."

In the end Gibson simply runs out of arguments and Hickey is out of his jacket and through the curtain in one quick movement. He feels so bold now, away from the ice. The noise of the Christmas feast is barely even an echo in the distance, like a backward glance at a dream he is relieved to have woken from. He sits right on the bed, because why not? The frame his high, his legs swing.

Billy eyes him for a moment, then pulls out his little leather needle pouch and some thread and gets to work. He's so very quick at it, he barely needs any thread, and seems to have finished in a few neat flicks of his wrist. Hickey supposes that sewing buttons back onto coats must be his bread and butter. 

"Here," Billy holds it out, "good as new. You cannot say I am not a good wife to you. Now we really must--"

"What about my boots?" Hickey sticks one leg out.

"Surely they can wait? No one's going to pull you up on uniform today, of all days."

Hickey kicks off the boot, lets it drop. Billy winces at the sound it makes, but he's excited, Hickey can tell. He wants to see what will happen next. Hickey kicks off the second boot.

"Come here and help me with the rest." He beckons Billy forward with a jerk of his chin. Billy comes to him, obediently.

Hickey leans back on the narrow bed, resting on his elbows, fingers fanning out on the coarse blankets as Billy begins work on his belt.

"How'd you fit in this little cot, eh longshanks?" Hickey teases.

"How do you ever get into your hammock, short arse?" Gibson raises his blue eyes with just the tiniest hint of spite. Hickey likes that. 

He moves back further, until his back is against the wall, and Gibson has to climb in with him. It's much too tight a fit, they squirm and they twist like a pair of eels, trying to stay silent all the while and still unbuckling and unbuttoning each other as they do. 

Finally they both find their places, side by side. They are lying together -  _ laying _ together, and isn't that the part that's a sin? If he remembers his bible right. Perhaps he'll ask Billy to look it up, afterwards. 

Hickey's head rests on Billy's pillow, which has the scent of his hair on it, and that's his first surprise. He doesn't know why he hadn't expected this, but everything in this small space smells of Billy, and now with Billy's cock in his hand and Billy's fingers brushing against his skin and Billy's  _ forehead _ pressed into his shoulder as he hums with soft pleasure, Hickey is surrounded. He is not thinking of the ice or the rocks or the eternal greyness out there. He  _ cannot _ recall these things any more. 

These desires are still new to him, he doesn't yet know what they will lead to. It riles his insides, he is hot and hard and wanting. Billy finally wraps his hand around Hickey's yard and lets out a soft cry of delight as Hickey thrusts eagerly into his fingers. 

He manages not forget himself entirely, and he realises Gibson is making too much noise already. 

"Hush, Billy," he whispers urgently, ears pricked for movement just outside. He's sure he can hear the murmur of voices, faint as it is. Billy only answers with another whimper.

It will take some maneuvering, but he's got to muffle the idiot somehow, and he's not willing to stop now they've started. He maintains a lazy rhythm on Billy's prick with one hand and with the other, slung around his shoulder he tries to cover Gibson's mouth. As he does, they roll closer against each other, and the bed or Hickey's thigh must have caught just the right angle for Billy, who yelps and pitches forward, whispering frantically, "Oh oh oh oh, please…" Hickey's free arm has only succeeded in drawing them together, and he isn't really sure what makes him do it, except they haven't really been this  _ kind _ of close before and he's curious to see what it's like.

Instead of his hand, he presses his mouth to Billy's lips, stifling another gasp. Billy is a quick study and leans into it, kissing back. Their lips and tongues slide against each other clumsily as down below their knuckles knock together erratically. It shuts Billy up, and Hickey finds himself unable to stop.

They have brought each other off countless times over the past months, in various configurations, but this is the first time it has felt like a union. They are working at it  _ together _ ; they are two people who want the same thing from each other. Billy's mouth is hot and wet. He tastes of rum and something metal, and as he searches Hickey's mouth he raises his free hand to Hickey's jaw, cupping his head as if Billy is afraid he'll pull away. His long fingers stroke that hidden part behind Hickey's ear, and then he  _ does _ want to pull away, because that is too gentle. Only there is so little space that he hasn't the room to back out, so instead he bites Gibson's tongue, enough to draw a little blood. Gibson's tender hand becomes a fist, ripping at Hickey's hair, fingernails clawing his scalp in shock, and then Hickey is done for, taken completely unawares with Billy all around him, on his tongue and in his head - he spends, shuddering helplessly in Gibson's arms.

Even Billy is surprised, Hickey is never the first off the mark, and not like this, not ever. Billy holds him through it, and doesn't stop kissing him until he regains his composure and works all the harder at forcing Billy to an ecstatic spasm of his own.

Afterwards he wipes his hands on the bedding and then his mouth with the back of his wrist. Gibson is already up, washing himself with a damp flannel, which he tosses at Hickey. It's cold, but he's glad for it, he needs bringing back to his senses.

There's no talking afterwards, there's nothing to say. They fasten their trousers and straighten their braces and Hickey shrugs into his newly mended jacket, stoops to retrieve his boots. They leave Gibson's berth unseen, and return to the soaking dishes. The water is barely warm any more, but Billy picks up a rag and begins to scrub. Hickey sits by, watching him idly and thinking, thinking, thinking.

Billy makes no sign that he minds, or that he'd like any help. Occasionally he offers a small smile, glancing up, but mostly he is absorbed in his work. He looks relaxed, calm, but every now and then Hickey can see him moving his tongue inside his mouth, running it across his teeth, pressing against the inside of his cheek and frowning just a little, feeling the sting where Hickey bit him.

* * * 

He made a real mess of the first man he killed. There was blood all right, lots of it. It was so dark out he didn't even notice until he got back to his room. 

There had been two problems with the situation. First, he hadn't known exactly what he was doing, second; he was angry. It's better not to be angry, if you're going to kill a man, it's better to just stick to getting the job done. That's a lesson that takes a while to learn. The rest of it isn't as difficult, it's just a matter of learning where to stick them, or clobber them, or cut them. It doesn't even have to hurt that much. 

But the first time, that was a disaster from start to finish. He isn't even sure where it started, he only remembers following Bess down the alley, her screaming, and the knife in his hand. 

They were in London then, he was sixteen, or thereabouts. He and Bess had made it through a winter in the East End by the skin of their teeth and he was no longer under any illusions that the revolution was coming. He had thought he'd seen the worst of mankind in Liverpool, but London taught him that there was always more detritus waiting to be uncovered. They both grew meaner, he saw his own cold stare reflected back at him in Bess's dark eyes. They were hungry all the time, hungrier than they had ever been, but they did it, they came out the other end. He saved every penny she made - and a few he made, when things were really desperate - and by the spring they had a place to stay, and a regular enough income.

He spent his evenings in pubs, making sure Bess was working and not drinking too much, and that she got the money she was due. Rather, the money  _ he _ was due. 

She'd screamed before. Been hit plenty of times, and he would always spring out to defend her - usually just waving the knife near the punter's balls was enough to scare them off. Probably would have been enough for this one, too, but he wasn't in the mood that night. They'd had a particularly difficult week, Bess had tried to kick the gin but failed miserably, resulting in one of her sprees. That had her good for nothing for days, and him out of pocket. So he'd done what he'd had to do, he'd gone out alone and got a bit of rough treatment in the docklands. 

He was still sore about that when he heard Bess screaming, but if that was why he did it then why not the man who'd done it to him? He'd had his knife on him then, he could have. It made no sense.

"Owwww" she shrieked, and he heard grunting. He thinks maybe it was the grunting that set him moving. He had his knife out, he doesn't remember retrieving it. Suddenly he was behind the punter, watching that threadbare tweed jacket strain over hulking shoulders, and in his mind all he could hear was the _clack clackclack _of the mechanical looms, built for one purpose, to thrust in and out and up and down. The knife went in so many times, everywhere he could reach. By the end he was crouching over the body, looking for new places, virgin flesh to desecrate. Bess had gone quiet by then, her tears dried quickly, and when he finally stood he saw they were both covered in blood. The cobblestones were slick.

They left the body there. Stupid, very stupid, but neither of them dared suggest moving it, they just wanted to get away quickly without being seen. Bess had the idea to take his purse and search his pockets, but they didn't turn up much.

When they got back to the room - a basement in Shoreditch, smaller and darker than their Liverpool accommodation, but with a less scrupulous landlord - Bess helped him undress, and she washed him like he really was her child. They didn't say much, she wrapped him up in a blanket and sat him on the bed like a doll while she cleaned herself up. 

"We'll get you new clothes," she whispered, her voice warm and sober. "That's what we spend his money on, eh? And a dress for me, maybe. Have ourselves a nice treat. We've earned it, eh my dear? Eh?"

He didn't have an answer. He felt very tired. He lay back, and she came to lie with him, as she always did. She stroked his hair and coiled her pale arms about him, "I'm proud of you, kid, you're such a good boy."

"I'll do it cleaner, next time." He closed his eyes, and she kissed him.

* * *

Torrington dies on New Years Day, John Hartnell three days later.

That's one for Terror, one for Erebus, except Tom Hartnell is on Terror, so it feels like everyone is twice as miserable. Hickey makes a show of giving Tom his rum ration for the week. Always good to engender a bit of goodwill if it doesn't cost you.

He didn't know Torrington well - a manc stoker, he was down there in the black coal dust all day, if it made him sick then that was only a hazard of the job. In the factories the dust from the cotton got into your lungs and smothered you from the inside. Maybe coal was the same, he had been coughing before he died.

Hickey hadn't seen much of Hartnell before he popped his clogs, but the Erubites he heard talk about it sounded shaken. The doctors cut him up, they said. They sliced him open and pulled out his insides to look at, before stuffing them all back in and sewing him up again. Hickey finds it hard to stop thinking about this. He lies awake at night imagining Stanley and Goodsir up to their elbows in Hartnell's red bits. Could you put everything back, just so? Or was it more like trying to tidy away a box of silk scarves, tangled and sliding all over the place? Based on experience, he thinks perhaps the latter.

"Why would they do it?" Davie gnaws his fingernails over supper. "Couldn't be no saving him, George Chambers said he was cold for hours."

"Check it wasn't scurvy, I expect," Wilson shrugs. "Or consumption, I heard it was that."

"So what if it was?" Davie rubs his lips, gormless.

"Because it spreads, boy, don't you know nuffink?"

"That's what the lime juice is for," Davie sniffs, sulkily.

"That's right, Davie," Hickey says, "so drink yours up, eh?"

He doesn't know anything about scurvy, but he plans to find out. Consumption he has seen before, and that is a matter of great concern to him. It's ugly and slow and it always kills. It's in the air, or the water, maybe, and if one person has it then others near him might. Hickey looks at his dining companions carefully, as he did at Christmas. Do they look well? They are hunched over, many of them, but that could be habit from years of stooping below decks. They look tired, they look bored and glassy eyed, but the light is dim and winter interminable.

He straightens up, tilling over the food on his plate, a red soupy mess with hunks of something you might call meat if you were very hungry. He stretches and feels a twinge. Is his back sore from sleeping in a hammock months on end, from bending to his work or bending over Gibson? Or is there something more insidious inside him now? Something worse than cotton dust or coal. His thoughts grow stranger by the day, but don't all men's minds turn odd at sea? Something to ask Billy, later.

Whatever it is, there is no mistake that change is finally on its way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. The Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter! 
> 
> The misery gets more miserable in this, apologies.

In London he had heard people talk about a winter when the Thames froze over. They said you could walk an elephant over the ice right around the river bend from Lambeth to Bermondsey, build a great fire and stage a feast. He had never quite been able to picture it.

At Beechey, the first time he saw the sea freeze around them he thought it must be what the end of the world felt like. But they made it through that strange twilight winter, and in the summer the sea thawed and they finally sailed away. 

It was as if the crew had thawed too. They rubbed their eyes as the daylight crept back in, they blinked and stretched. Their cracked and brittle skin of ice sloughed away; they grew supple and vital once more. Each man remembered the task he joined the expedition to perform and attended to it with gratitude and renewed buoyancy as the ships ploughed their way further north.

The ship's boys are whistling and the marines are preening and there is a lightness to the officers' condescending smiles once more. The men sleep easier in their hammocks at night, tired from hard work and satisfied they are on their way now. Gibson's posture straightens, he ducks his head less, and Hickey feels he has a true measure of everyone. He can happily while away the remainder of this icy sojourn in relative comfort, and when he leaves it all behind it will mean nothing more to him than the workhouse.

He feels a somewhat more himself for a time, or at least, he feels a little more like Cornelius Hickey, a man with prospects and a plan for his future. He leaves his darker thoughts behind on that ugly bay, with the rocks and the fog and the three graves.

Grief peels away and life returns to the Terror, along with a new energy for finding the flipping passage. It's all anyone talks about, and of course the singing starts up again, all conquest and empire. Hickey doesn't know how anyone will know they've found it, everything looks the same up here. And who would ever come again? If you wanted misery then there were places closer to home. 

If he were captain, he'd just sail where he pleased and come up with a good story. That's all anyone wants, really. 

This new sense of adventure is short-lived. First a man on Erebus is drowned, and then Davie, that scrawny little foundling brat chokes his guts up all over the mess. And maybe Hickey has been around sailors too long, but he knows a bad omen when he sees one. 

One morning Hickey wakes from a dreamless sleep, and before he has even opened his eyes it's clear that something is wrong. They all feel it before they even set foot on deck to see it. The stillness has returned, the ice has them again.

This is not the same as Beechey. The ice doesn't feel the same, the cold is not the cold from before. There is no shore, this time, not one rock or stone. They do not move, but they are adrift all the same. 

At night, when it is colder still, the ice seems to grow. It squeezes Terror closer and closer, pressing on the iron and the timbers, the creaking almost deafening. Even the officers speak about it in different terms; this has surprised them. Shaken them. 

Hickey has felt this way before, beneath those mechanical looms. In the belly of a snapping beast, surrounded by teeth. It is telling him something, he knows that. He just can't read it yet. 

* * *

There are no elephants here to parade, but Hickey is certain the ice will hold a beast of any size, having attempted himself to dig into it with a shovel. Their tools skitter and scrape against the frozen sea, an exercise in futility. The biting cold burns their cheeks and freezes their eyelashes; if they stand in place too long the cold creeps into their boots, fills their socks and wraps tight around their toes like garotting wire. He is not willing to lose any parts of himself to this ridiculous venture. Hickey is vain about his body; he has almost no scars at all, not so much as a silver streak, not one tattoo, and he plans to keep things that way. 

Still, he’s outside as much as he can be, because the ice has opened a pathway between Terror and Erebus, and for the first few weeks they are frozen in there is almost constant movement between the two ships. The cold air makes sound carry, and there is a lot more to hear outside the ship than inside it. What’s more, he knows he needs to get used to the conditions. They may be here even longer than they were at Beechey.

Today he finds himself at the cold end of a human chain lugging boxes out of the hold up onto the deck, down the ramp they have built and onto the ice to be loaded on sleds and dragged to Erebus. Billy will be doing the dragging, along with his Erebus counterpart, John Bridgens. Hickey is jealous again; so far he hasn’t had a chance to get anywhere near the other ship. They’re being escorted by Private Heather who at this moment is standing by, sharing a cigarette with Sgt. Tozer, watching the rest of them work. Hickey watches them right back, until Tozer barks at him to move his arse.

Hickey smiles to himself. Tozer only barely tolerates him; they gripe and snap at each other with every encounter. But Tozer's still a soldier, and a man, so if Hickey offers him a spot of tobacco or the last half of his cig, he rarely turns it down. And Hickey can’t resist needling him, if he sees an opportunity, it’s almost a game between them now.

Solomon Tozer is a proud man, and he is an honest man. But he has an accent which means he is often humbled by thoughtless officers. You hear it all the time.  _ "Sorry, sergeant, say that again will you? There's a good chap. Never did get much of an ear for those charming rural dialects!" _

Tozer doesn't show it, but Hickey knows how that rankles. 

Anyway, the other marines like Tozer. Everyone likes him; he's something of hero below decks. He cuts a singular figure in his scarlet uniform, while remaining reassuringly familiar to men who are generally discomforted by their unfathomable, upper class officers. Tozer reminds everyone of some fine lad they knew back home. They listen when Tozer speaks. Georgie is half in love with him, follows him everywhere when he’s not being run ragged by the rest of the crew. 

“Cornelius,” Gibson interrupts his thoughts. “What are you  _ staring _ at?” He sounds a bit put out. His arms are outstretched, he’s waiting to receive the next weighty bundle. Hickey tosses it over, quite hard, knocking Billy's breath out in a long white cloud. Hickey grins.

Gibson rights himself and loads the last of the goods, turning to secure them.

“See you this evening, then,” Hickey says casually, feeling in his pockets for his tobacco. He’s running low, but Armitage owes him, he can call that one in once they’re back inside. 

“I’ll be back after dark, I expect.”

“It’s always after dark here.” Hickey replies, as a statement of fact, rather than a grumble. 

“What I mean is, I’ll most likely eat on Erebus.”

Hickey shrugs. He doesn’t care where Gibson gets his meals. Billy tuts, still irked, “what  _ were _ you looking at?” He says, his voice low. His eyes dart to Tozer, then back. He thinks he’s being subtle.

Hickey’s tongue plays in the corner of his cheek. Billy has been getting more quarrelsome of late. Perhaps it’s the thought of another winter locked in, or perhaps he can sense Hickey’s own agitation, and has mistaken it for a wandering eye. He casts around for a likely diversion, and settles on Peglar, who is saying his farewells to Bridgens.

"Seen those two?" Hickey nods at the pair, talking quietly and intently over a book. 

Their heads are very close together, and there’s something about the way they are standing. It’s clear what’s going on there. You know just by looking.

Billy looks at them blankly and gives a careless shrug. "They're good friends, have been for years." 

"Is that what it is?" Hickey raises an eyebrow.

Gibson shakes his head.

"Get your mind out of the gutter, there's clearly great affection between them. Great love."

Hickey says nothing, he waits for later. Later when Gibson is back from Erebus, and they're alone in the dark, breathing hard and hands everywhere, Hickey whispers in Billy's ear,

"And what's between us, Mr Gibson?" He strokes him faster and drives in harder, "is it great affection?"

Billy groans, collapsing forward, boneless. Hickey grins, triumphantly, and holds up his wet hand to Billy's face, rubbing his fingers together so Billy can see them glisten, "is this love?"

He doesn't do it to be particularly cruel. He does it to see if Billy will surprise him. He doesn't, which is a pity. Billy kisses him and laughs, saying haughtily,

"Cornelius, I would never presume to tell you your mind."

He does not allude to his own feelings, and that gives Hickey pause, but he tucks that away for later. Gibson is like a cat, he yearns to be fussed over and pleased and made comfortable, but Hickey is never quite sure if he'll keep coming back. Bess was a cat, too.

* * *

He and Bess did pretty well for themselves for a while. They had many of the things they wanted, they had each other, and they had the unrivalled satisfaction of doing in all those men. 

They got better at it, hardly made any mess at all, and knew exactly how to deal with the bodies. He spent a few mornings watching the butchers in the early hours before Spitalfields market opened, and he learnt how to do it properly. A pig is like a man, one of the mongers told him; all their parts are in the same place. Kill a pig and you can kill a man.

She chose the mark, usually. Bess had an eye for a man's purse. She'd give him a wink from across the pub, and he'd know to follow. He used various weapons, a knife, a length of chord - if they were old and weak, and for a time he carried around a big cosh. On a quiet enough night by the docks, you could hear their skulls crack.

Then they would search his pockets, and take whatever had any weight or shine to it. Sometimes his clothes could be sold on too, his hat, his shoes - once Bess rolled up a trouser leg to find their victim had a pair of very fine ladies silk stockings on underneath. Those fetched a good price, once they'd been washed. 

Added to Bess's more usual line of work, and as long as he was able to handle the money, they lived comfortably in their Shoreditch room. They had food when they were hungry, Bess had every ribbon and trinket she desired, and he was learning more every day about the world. He rarely spent money on himself, there was little that interested him, but he bought her small gifts of grapes and petticoats and she squealed with joy. 

Talk of her becoming a lady's maid vanished, but he eventually found that he couldn't give her everything. There were things she wanted that he did not understand.

She started wandering off, dressed differently than usual. When he first met her, Bess had spent her days dozing in bed, lazing about and maintaining her habit, but after a few years in London there was a marked change. She would get up early and leave without notice, wearing a neat little hat and Sunday shoes. She went to church and - she told him - the art galleries, sometimes.

“What for?” He furrowed his brow, “no good trade there.”

“There’s things I want to see,” she said, cryptically, “I like looking at pretty things. Yow should come with me.”

He didn’t, he couldn’t see the point. 

“Yow should have something else in your life, kid,” she sighed. “Can’t all be blood and whoring.”

He didn’t see why not. They didn’t discuss it again. He wasn’t sure quite when the change happened, distracted as he was with the business of survival, but his association with Red Bess came to an end that was just as abrupt as its beginning. 

One night he returned from an evening pickpocketing in St James's Park and found the door bolted against him. He pressed his ear to the wood, and heard the familiar noises of Bess's trade. Put out, but exhausted from his own evening’s work and the journey back, he sat in the hall and waited, just as he had as a boy in Liverpool. Only he was not a boy now; he had Bess had shared digs for longer than he cared to admit, and he didn’t like this change in the terms.

He sat with his back to the wall, wrists resting on his knees, the weight of fifteen stolen pocket watches lying cold and heavy against his ribs. He could hear the iron bedframe screeching and thunking, and Bess's high soft sighs. He'd never heard her put on a show like that before, it was usually the only time she ever shut up. Perhaps this punter had paid extra for her to enjoy it. You got queer sorts like that, sometimes. Someone had given him a few more coins for that, once. He had to say, "oh sir, that is ever so good sir," in his best toff accent. That particular man could not stand to hear the Liverpool in his voice, he'd yank on his hair if any scouse slipped out.

When the door finally opened, he had almost nodded off to sleep, and the sound shocked him, he was on his feet in an instant. He didn't get a look at the man's face, only heavy, expensive boots and a swagger. A dark coat, a man with means.

Bess was lounging on the bed in her underthings, face shining like a lantern, humming to herself.

"What are you doing, bringing them here?" He scolded her. 

"Oh, all right, our kid?" She sighed at him, "back early?"

He crossed the room, palm out, "Give me the money, Bess."

"Ow, I like that!" She scowled, "'give us yer money,' no, 'How are you tonight, Bessie-girl?' no 'pleased to see you.'"

"The money."

"Weren't no money. It was a favour."

"A favour."

She rolled her eyes. "He's a friend, I fancied it, that's all. I'll go out tomorrow."

"Slut."

"Oh,  _ do one. _ "

He stared at her, fists clenched. She rolled over to look for a cigarette, the bedsheets tangled up at her feet, used and dishevelled.

"That's my bed too." He fumed. 

She laughed, a light, trilling thing. He realised she was completely sober, her eyes clear and focussed. She held a match to an expensive looking cigarette, long and brown.

"Don't be angry with me my darling, it was just a quick leg-over, it's what beds are for."

"Not  _ this _ bed."

"Gawd, don't I know that," she tutted, flicking ash.

"There's a way of doing things," he rounded on her, "we have an agreement."

"He's not part of the agreement, he's just for me."

"So you’re taking lovers, now?" He snorted, angry enough to spit, "You're a whore, and if he didn't know that before, he does now."

She glared at him, her eyes shining through the smoke, then muttered darkly, "Ain't my fault yow don't know how to have a good time, ya poncy little mary anne."

"What did you call me?" 

If there was ever a moment he considered killing Bess, really ripping her to pieces, that was it.

"I know where yow go every night," she exhaled blue smoke, the thick cloying scent of liquorice filled the room. "When you're not working me like a pack horse or working yourself up over gutting men. I know where yow go, and I know yow like it, too,  _ boy lover _ . Don't you start preaching at me about where I take my pleasure when you're sick all the way through, you dirty bastard."

His temper drained away. His fingers felt cold, he didn't even want to kill her any more. He went to the trunk to pull out his jacket, and without another word he left. He did not see Bess again for five years.

* * * 

He’s not particularly surprised that he and Gibson got caught in the end. They were never as careful about it as they told each other they were. Hickey’s own excuses wore thinner and thinner, and they exploited the mood of the rest of the crew, which was foggy and sullen. No one asked where they’d been, because no one much cared. Until one day someone did.

Hickey was vaguely interested to see what would happen if the thing was left alone. But of course Billy couldn’t leave it alone, and so nor can Lieutenant Irving.

It had to be Irving. Buggering  _ Irving _ of all people. A simpering virgin, pretty as a girl and cleaving to his bible like a whore to her gin bottle. Hickey could forgive that, it’s none of his business. But what he won't forgive is the hypocrisy; how clearly and deeply Irving is  _ ashamed _ of himself, how he cringes beneath his rank and his uniform.

Hickey had smelt it before the ships even left port, Irving reeked of shame. Inadequacy. Irving is not honest with himself, and that is the greatest mistake a man can make, as far as Hickey is concerned. To think that a coward like that should hold his entire future in his hands.

_ A man's worst urges. _ That's a good joke, considering Hickey is a man of very few urges. There are simply things he will do, and things he will not do. 

He takes his dressing down with an appropriate display of meekness, and stores up his outrage for Billy. No need to involve Irving any further than that idiot already has, and it does sound as though at least the saintly lieutenant will not be taking things any further. 

Besides, he thinks smugly, as he returns to his work, Irving saw him conversing with the captain. There could be no plainer sign that Hickey's star is in the ascendant, and Irving is no fool, at least not in that respect.

Crozier has seen him, they have seen each other. They share a bond as countrymen, they shared a drink together. Yes, those were two wrong beats, perhaps - as far as he knows he has no Irish blood at all, and he does not ever drink - but the rhythm is right. He could have sworn for a moment that Crozier knew his secret, seemed to be congratulating him on it. The captain is an educated man, intelligent and experienced. The men who have sailed under him before all attest to this. A gloomy sod, but a man you could follow. And now the two of them have an understanding.

So he's willing to forgive Billy's stupidity. He's even willing to forgive the lie - that it was Hickey who 'pressed' him, and not Billy who'd come around gagging for it in the hold that day. As long as an apology is forthcoming, Hickey will overlook it. Friends out here are a finite resource.

Billy finally surprises him. 

_ Pettish _ , he says, "don't be  _ pettish _ about it," looming over Hickey in a cramped space, just like the first time he begged to be fucked. And now he would like a different arrangement, now he has decided the matter is closed.  _ It's not personal. _

Of course it had never been personal, and if Billy has decided to break their association, then Hickey isn't going to miss rutting in cramped corners, he isn't going to mourn the loss of something he hadn't even needed in the first place. But he will not be mocked. He will not be laughed at, and Billy ought to know better.

* * *

There’s less to distract him now that Billy is no longer on his list of concerns. The ships are not moving - Hickey doesn’t think they will ever move, now - they are part of the ice, being slowly digested by the heartless sea. Nevertheless, a change is coming, the mood has shifted, and it is time to rethink a few things.

He was right, when he had that feeling on Beechey. There is something out there in the ice, something worse than hunger or bad weather. Perhaps it’s a bear, but he doesn’t think so. Not judging by the way the marines are talking about it. Not judging by the way it did for Gore and Sir John. All they found was a leg, that’s the word below decks. So whatever the beast is, it has a sense of humour. 

Yes, it’s time to reconsider his position. Erebus has a new leader and Terror’s own captain seems to be more obviously soused each time Hickey sees him - which is not often; Crozier is generally locked away guzzling spirits. That is unfortunate, he had thought better of him. Hickey does not tolerate drinkers. Whether they are captains or whores, he has known too many of them, and they are all the same. They do not make correct decisions, they do not act in time. So he keeps his head clear and his ears open, he watches for an opportunity. 

It cannot be a natural creature, whatever it is hunting them. He does not think any animal could stay natural for very long in this place; where the wind and the water and the sky want you dead. In the wake of Sir John’s demise the men are turning strange. They are sick, not just in their bodies, but all over -  _ sick all the way through _ . Their faces are waxy and pale, they are tired, they are sore and hungry and quick to anger. Things will get worse. They have been squeezed by the ice, and by the darkness and each other, and Hickey knows what happens when too much pressure is applied for too long.

He also knows what happens afterwards - when the seams finally split and everything is burst open - afterwards comes relief, clarity, and new avenues to explore. He needs to keep things tight until then. 

He stops eating for a while, or at least he eats very little. The food they serve up has made him queasy from the start, and as more and more men on Terror weaken and pale, he becomes convinced it’s the slop they’re being fed. He’ll eat biscuits, chocolate, and anything else he recognises, but that is all. He likes being hungry; it makes him feel strong. It makes him feel in control. Still, when he is working in the hold (and he often is - the ice is pushing the caulking back through the planks. Seams are splitting all over) he eyes the rats and salivates.

He has eaten rat before. And cat, and dog. He would eat worse, if it came to it, as long as it’s not from those sinister red tins. The rats are eating the dead now, and they must be the plumpest things on the ship. They’d make a fine meal. He idly floats this notion to some of his mess mates. They laugh him off; they’re not there yet, but they will be, he just needs to be patient. You can learn to like anything, and you’ll last longer if you do.

Men will always change when they are ready to. When little Davie Young was in his coffin no one went through his pockets, they were all too pious, too scrupulous. Their loss was his gain, but that was a year ago. When Bryant died a few weeks ago a fight almost broke out for his woollens. 

He can wait a bit longer.

* * *

Strong and Evans are dead, it’s a waste of time trying to look for them. Everyone must know that, they’re lying to themselves again and he’s getting sick of it. This is exactly the sort of thing that could end them. 

Heather is another matter; that is something worth pursuing. His skull was opened up, according to the marines, and the men who carried him in - you could see everything inside. No one will describe it, and Tozer doesn’t say a word except to bolster his men with the usual nonsense. But Hickey wants to  _ know _ . He has seen brains before, but not a man’s - and not while the man is still breathing. He lives, that is what they say, but Hickey wonders. There is a world between breathing and living.

Anyway, it is not only Heather who has been exposed by this latest catastrophe, but Tozer too. The marines close ranks around Heather’s sickbed, and they do not look to the officers any more. They are in the thick black of winter now, and the men have a reason to be scared; there is no one on Terror who is truly fit for command. Tozer is a born leader, but of course that road is as closed to him as it is to Hickey.

They must find other ways to distinguish themselves.

The same officers who berated him for spending longer than the prescribed hour above deck last winter have no qualms about sending him up into the pitch dark unarmed this winter. He climbs the ladder prepared for the bracing cold, and feels his eyelashes and whiskers stiffen with frost almost at once. 

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust - things are gloomy and muggy down below, but outside the darkness is almost a solid thing. He is not alone, but he might as well be. As he steps boldly forward, keeping his steps sure so as not to slip on the slick deck, he sees what has been left there. A man, leaning over the gunwale as though calling down to his mate on shore. It’s wrong at a distance, and it gets more wrong as Hickey approaches. Still, he pulls at the man’s shoulder, and watches him split in two, toppling over like a chimney stack. 

The men are panicking, terrified, but he knows what this is. It’s a gift, and it was meant for him. He peers out at the frozen sea, and there! He sees it at once; they see each other. A hot fizz in Hickey’s gut tells him that they are not enemies, he and the creature; they are kin. He has been waiting all his life for a feeling like this. He has been looking for the voice that calls his name. 

He must act quickly, before the officers arrive. There is a chaotic scramble over the split bodies, and he uses this to his advantage. Tozer knows where to find the girl, and he’s not short of volunteers to join him - Armitage and Hartnell and of course Magnus, who will do anything for Hickey. They are frightened, but they are ready to act; they are relieved when he takes charge, he sees it at once. There are no ranks here, not now.

* * *

The five years between his abandonment of Bess and his meeting her again were loud and ugly, not least because he was imprisoned for two long stretches. Another kind of man might wonder whether he’d have been caught if he still had Bess around, but he was never much given to reminiscing. 

Prison was a familiar atmosphere. He even frayed rope for a while, memories of his childhood resurfacing and deepening his resolve to get out, to get as far away from it as he possibly could. There had to be a place in the world where a man could make more of himself; where life was not one long desperate clamber up a greased pole.

The men were diseased there too, and exhausted from the treadwheel, forced to sit in silence for months on end. These plagues the govenors visited upon them were his punishment for a life of crime. If that was the case, then he must have been a criminal the moment he was born, for even when he was free he had not yet lived one day without some bitter trial, some galling defeat or unexpected torment. He had starved in the workhouse, he had starved on the streets, and now he starved in Newgate. If there was a lesson in any of that then he must have been too busy trying to stay alive to learn it.

And he did stay alive. He came out of prison the second time even more wiry than before and quicker with his fists. If any parts of him had ever been soft - inside or out - then they were now sharpened to a point. 

He had nowhere to go, and not a penny to his name, and for some weeks slept under railway bridges or in parks, if the weather was fine. He kept his eyes peeled for a way out, a leg up - and that was what he was doing in that brothel, he hadn’t been looking for Bess. He’d heard conflicting stories from the old crowd - that she had died, been killed by a punter or consumption. That her gin habit had caught up to her, that she had married, that she’d boarded a ship for America.

He had heard about the brothel in Bethnal Green, he’d heard about the red haired madam running the place, but he hadn’t really believed it. He just knew it would be easy pickings, the kind of place men weren’t watching their wallets. Finding Bess was the absolute last thing on his mind.

She found him, anyway. He’d been on his way in - waiting for his moment. It was no good rushing it, that was an easy way to get caught. He was watching the doorway, just to see what the clientele was like; see if it was worth his effort. He’d have headed in at any moment.

Bess caught him unawares; he must have looked away, and there she was, standing before him, hands on her hips. She looked older. Broader, too much powder on. The wig was new, a softer copper colour than before.

"All right, our kid," she gave him a tired smile. Her accent was all London now. "Come inside."

For the first time since they'd met, she fed him. They sat alone in a quiet back room - "My own little parlour," she said. A room just for sitting in.

"Heard you married," he muttered, head bowed over his plate of bread soaked in dripping. 

"I did," she replied primly, lighting a cigarette. "He died."

"Accident, was it?" He glanced up at her, "left you some money?"

"As it goes," she nodded. "I loved him, in the beginning. Where have you been? Prison?"

"As it goes," he finished his plate and set it down on a dainty little table. The finish had come off the top, and she'd tried to cover it up with a poorly embroidered napkin.

"You need some proper shoes, kid."

"I need some cash."

She raises a black painted eyebrow. "Come around begging, have you? You can have a job, if that’s all you want.”

"A job? Here?”

“You sold my sorry hide for years, you never did me no favours.”

She wasn’t wrong. He pressed his lips together, wipes his greasy hands on his trouser legs, and nods very slightly, “I won’t be buggered.”

She cackled with gleeful laughter, “Setting the terms already, that’s my boy!”

“I’m not your anything,” he grumbled. 

“Less of that,” she tutted, “or I’ll put you in a dress.”

She’d stopped drinking. She told him she’d stopped when she met her husband, who’d taught her sums and keeping accounts. He had owned a small cab company, but she found that while she did have a surprisingly good head for figures, she wasn’t much good at horses and carriages. So once he popped his clogs she returned to what she knew. She made more money than they ever had together.

“Ever do ‘em in?” he asked, as she bedded him down for the night. She stroked his hair again, and he didn’t know if he liked it or not. It had been a very long time since he’d been touched that way.

“‘Course not,” she shook her head. “No way to run a business, is it? Anyway I never had the taste for it you had.”

In her way, Bess had finally become respectable. 

Once again he found himself lying in a real bed, under brightly coloured blankets in a room with a lock on the door. 

“Missed ya, kid,” she kissed him. “Wish we’d never had that row.”

He didn’t reply. He wasn’t built for regret.

Despite Bess’ new independence and her lingering resentment over the way he had treated her, she continued to be kind. He thought perhaps she was lonely; most nights she got in bed with him and pulled him close to her, even though they weren’t kids any more. He let her do it, if it meant he could stay there. 

She put him to work on the door, taking cash and eyeing up prospects. That would pay for his food and lodging, she said. If he wanted more then he could try selling more. He wasn’t going to. He was going to save up, get out. Leave London and go… somewhere. He didn’t know, yet. America. China. What did it matter, as long as he was free from the treadmill he’d been walking all his life.

And then he met Cornelius Hickey. 

Young Cornelius was an idiot. Not like Magnus was, just green; naive and soft. He was drunk, too, couldn’t understood a word the boy said in that rapid Irish patter. He hair a fair, round face and a moronic grin, and he was too loud for his own good.

He came in with some other boys his age - they were giving him a sendoff, they said. He was off to sea. You couldn’t get him off that topic, as he downed another pint of beer, his cheeks growing pinker, his words running into each other. He waved his papers about and grinned and boasted for hours. One by one, Hickey’s friends vanished into side rooms with Bess’s girls. Some of them were choosy, after a particular shade of blonde or a girl who knew french tricks. Most of them were happy to receive any kind of attention at all.

Cornelius Hickey didn’t go anywhere. He just kept talking, until eventually it was only the two of them in the receiving room. He kept listening to the lad, because there wasn’t much else to do; it was almost dawn, and if the kid didn’t want to get his leg over one of the girls then he may as well sit there and wait for his friends.

Eventually he went to sit beside him. They shared a cigarette and he kept topping up Hickey’s cup. 

“...and then a few months toasting on the beaches in the Sandwich Islands, and I said - sure that’s just the thing for me! They’ve fruit growing from the trees there bigger than my head, and you just shake the branches and take what you like…”

“I read about that,” he mused, “I read the sun shines all year.”

“...and the sea is clear as cut glass!” Cornelius nodded enthusiastically, spilling beer froth down his front, “I shall learn to swim, and fish for crabs.”

“You won’t miss England?”

“Pah! England’s fuck all to me, I tell you.”

Bess entered then, from her parlour. She eyed the two of them sitting on the couch, and lay a cajoling hand on Hickey’s cheek, “Have none of my girls delighted you this evening, sailor?”

“I’ve been conversing with…” Cornelius gestured at him, expecting a name. He chose not to give one, grinning up at Bess instead.

“We’ve been talking about the Sandwich Islands,” he said, softly. “Just like in the weeklies.”

“Ah, well, if you’re going that far you’ll want to have one last good English girl, eh, pet?” She stroked Hickey’s cheek again. He pulled away, a look crossing his face that confirmed what they already knew. Bess licked her lips, “or of not a girl, then…” 

Cornelius blinked, surprised, then looked over at him, questioning. He inclined his head and shrugged, as if he wouldn’t mind either way. And honestly, he wouldn’t. The kid’s so drunk he could just bring him off between his thighs, easy - if he even managed cockstand. 

Looking back, he’s not sure when he decided to kill Cornelius. It might have been the moment he waved his papers about like that, or all the talk of high sea adventure and long warm afternoons on white beaches. Or perhaps it was just the softness of him, and the careful way he strokes his body, even while he’s pissed.

“Shan’t see anything as fair as you in the polar sea,” Cornelius hums, and that’s when he decides  _ how _ he will do it - with a knife between his ribs, and a pillow over his face, and not until afterwards, because there weren’t enough tender moments in life, and Hickey may as well have his last one here. He struggles, but not much. Men are so weak after they’ve spent. 

He shouldn’t have done it in Bess’s bed. She was furious when she saw the blood soaking her sheets and the pillow covered in vomit. He had washed by then, and dressed himself in the boy’s clothes. He was already Cornelius Hickey.

“You can get rid of the body by yourself!” she hissed, flinging away the blankets, flying about the room like a madwoman, “take him out the back door, and don’t let me catch you around here again you ungrateful little prick!”

He tossed her half of Cornelius’s spare change by way of apology, and she lets him kiss her on the cheek before he leaves.

“Wish me luck,” he whistles, as he rolls the body up and hoists it off the bed.

* * *

It’s easier than he expects it to be, grabbing the eskie witch. Armitage is a bit rough with her, but it can’t be helped and Hickey doesn’t blame him. She has food in her little snow house - strips of seal meat which the four men share out between them on the journey back. He makes them swear not to say a word about that. 

The creature startled and fled before they got very close, which is a shame. Still, he’s glad the others saw it too - he’s glad that they know something of what he knows. 

On Terror, Crozier has suddenly decided he wants to be captain, this evening, and - worst luck - Fitzjames is aboard. Hickey owns up to it at once, because he’ll be damned if anyone else takes credit for it, he wants everyone to know just what he is willing to do. Even if they don’t understand now, they will remember later.

The two captains sit behind Crozier’s desk, wry and disapproving and just as miserable as every other soul on this fucking expedition. One is drunk - sloppy drunk - the other has that bored disdain that men above a certain class are obliged to affect in the presence of men like Cornelius Hickey. He doesn’t care, not now. Not one man on Terror or Erebus is worth his consideration any more. 

Disrespect. That’s a laugh. A flogging isn’t going to change what he has done, a flogging isn’t going to change what he’s seen tonight. 

They’re held in the captain’s cabin and brought out one at a time for their punishment. Hartnell goes first. Hickey would have volunteered, but apparently Crozier wants to save him for last. 

He doesn’t ask what it means; ‘as a boy’, because he knows it can’t be good, and so he’d rather not know. He knows it will hurt, but that is nothing to concern himself with, he has never shied away from pain. 

Manson cries, Hickey can hear it from where he's held. Magnus doesn't yell out, he weeps, frightened and confused as a dumb animal. Hickey resents Crozier all the more; there was no need for that. Everyone knows Magnus is an idiot, he only admitted to the deed because Hickey did first. He regrets that, somewhat. He hopes Magnus won't blame him for it, not after a year of patient kindness.

They walk him out and all of the men are gathered to watch. He's stripped to his waist, only his thin long johns for modesty, he hasn't been this naked in over a year. Even Gibson has not seen this much of him. Let them look. The room is stifling, and smells of blood already. 

The cat o' nine tails is still dripping. He struggles not to recoil at that, the thought of it touching him; Hartnell and Manson's blood mingling with his. He thinks on that, and barely registers Crozier’s grating voice barking out his crimes.

"...and dirtiness." That gives him pause, he doesn't remember that coming up in the captain's cabin. 

He thinks of Gibson, and wonders for a moment whether he told about how Hickey had exacted his revenge - he had thought Neptune got the blame for that. But then he sees Irving, and remembers that little situation.  _ Prick _ . Crozier must have loved hearing that. That probably justified the whole thing in the man's whisky addled mind.

The table. What is the table for?

He is pushed forward, and he is bent over, and with a swimming sense of nausea he finds himself in an extremely familiar situation. They would not. Surely they would not?

They are all watching him. He feels their eyes on his skin, and even in the stuffy air of the lower deck it turns him cold. They all know what is coming; the atmosphere is thick with shame as they tie him to the table - but it is not _his_ shame. He wants to snarl at them that there is no need, he will stay put, he knows how to grit his teeth and bear it.

That  _ clack clackclack  _ begins inside his head. He knows it is inside his head, but it is louder than anything else on the deck, louder than all of the men's silence as they stare at his body. He's sure he can smell coal and piss, like the cellar of that merchant's filthy den, and they unfasten his long johns now, and oh, this all makes so much fucking sense, this is not a flogging, this is not justice. He knows exactly what this is.

The rope rasps at his wrist - oakum, always oakum, his lot in life, his constant companion. He places his palms flat on the wood and prepares for the worst as he is exposed to everyone, as vulnerable as poor Heather’s brains. 

The first whipcrack hits him, and he clenches his jaw. He doesn’t make a sound, but the pain is enormous, and he knows he will have to cry out before this is over. No one could blame him for that, no one could think less of him for just getting through it. He won’t beg, and he won’t ask them to stop, but he thinks he will scream.

Again.

It is white hot, firing up his nerves, he feels it scorch his back and his shoulders, his fingernails digging into the rope which binds him - he’s grateful for that now. His ears are ringing, his teeth ache with it. The blood starts running after the third lash, and on the fourth he finally breaks his silence, the pain escaping in a throaty moan.

He feels the mood of the crew, they shift from foot to foot, hands folded in front of them. There’s no triumph, none of that naval pride left. Only sick, frightened men and the sound of the captain’s voice, ordering more suffering.

“Again.”

On, and on. He groans and he cries out as the cat strikes, knots digging in like shards of glass or tiny sharp cornered stars, ripping and re-ripping his own burning flesh until he feels he cannot be a man any more; he has been flayed into something new and foul and blazing. He breathes, with each moment of respite he inhales while he can, he tries to winch up a single thought from his brain, a shred of reason - anything but the wail of agony he feels rising up his throat like foaming sea water. 

_ Breathe deep. Stop shivering. Smile and say thank you. You can get used to anything. _

Another back splitting strike, and he knows he cannot get used to this, he cannot lean into it, only brace against. He has always known his limits, and this,  _ this  _ is the end of it. He will not be sane after this, he will be something new. 

And then it is over. The sound does not come, the lightning strike of agony is not delivered. There is still pain. It pools and floods him, and even as they unwind his wrists he thinks he cannot move. He would like to fall forward, lie flat. To lean into this, to inhale and relax, that would be bliss, but he won’t do it. 

He won't, because will not be carried, not by any of these men. He is borne up, and stands unaided. As he rights himself he feels every laceration at once, he feels the hot blood spill from him and gather between his toes. His head spins sickly as he stands straight, and then comes a new sensation. 

The burning sting peaks and does not recede, but transforms. The swinging oil lamps above him seem to pour out molten gold over his head, sliding down his abused body and filling him up with the only peace he has ever known. The cool light gathers in his belly and swells in his chest and it is in his ears and welling in his eyes and pooling on his tongue like syrup, like pure liquid pleasure. His bones are singing, his nerves humming. The crew and the captain and the officers fall away, there is no ship, no ice, no pain. He sees everything so very clearly, and it’s beautiful.

There are no limits now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
